During the production of a thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD), a photoresist coated on a glass substrate needs to be developed after exposure to obtain a desired pattern.
As shown in FIGS. 1 and 2, in a developing device for an advanced-generation production line, a glass substrate 3 is provided in a developing trough at a certain inclination angle (θ) relative to a machine table 1, with its inclination direction and angle being kept the same. An inclination direction and an inclination angle of a nozzle 2 for spraying a developing liquid are consistent with those of the glass substrate 3. The developing liquid contacted by the glass substrate 3 positioned at an upper portion of an inclination surface (side a-a of the glass substrate 3 in FIG. 1) during the development is new liquid sprayed via the nozzle 2, and has a constant concentration. The concentration of the developing liquid becomes low after reacting with the photoresist and flows toward a lower portion of the inclination surface (side b-b of the glass substrate 3 in FIG. 1), resulting in that the concentration of the developing liquid contacted by the glass substrate 3 at the lower portion of the inclination surface (side b-b of the glass substrate 3 in FIG. 1) is lower than that contacted by the glass substrate at the upper portion. A line width of glass inclination surface at the upper portion (i.e., side a-a) is narrower than that at the lower portion (i.e., side b-b), thereby the line width uniformity of the whole glass substrate is adversely affected; for example, line width m<line width n as shown in FIG. 3.
As shown in FIG. 4, there currently is another developing method in which the development is performed in such a way that the machine table 1 drives glass substrate 3 to rotate, but this method is not applicable to the advanced-generation production line because the glass substrate 3 for the advanced-generation production line has a particularly large size and fragments may be produced during the rotation.
Therefore, for the advanced-generation production, some film layers (such as a black matrix of a color filter substrate and respective film layers of an array substrate) require high line width uniformity, and there is a need to find a developing device, which is capable of providing better line width uniformity, for the development.